From Consumption to Refusal: A Four-Part Exploration of the Dilemmas of Black Academics

• In Event: 51.078 - MTCC Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: 51.078-9 - Exploring Racialized Factors for Thriving and Surviving in Education

Abstract

This paper explores how institutions of higher education continue to systematically marginalize faculty of color, thus perpetuating inequity at institutions. Weaving autoethnographic narratives across three metaphors—the stage, the distance, and the train—the author theorizes a space of pedagogical refusal by working through a four-part tracing of their educational journey, exploring how colleges and universities increasingly participate in the consumption and accumulation of liberatory knowledge systems to benefit populations of students that do not come from the communities who have inherited and maintained these systems. The paper concludes by drawing from Tuck and Yang (2014a, 2014b), and Harney and Moten’s (2013) explorations of refusal as a stance that has the potential to reposition and empower faculty of color.

Author

• Brian Lozenski, Macalester College